I don’t understand why. I really don’t. I was going to stop with the consonants. To be honest, my goal was to do both the consonants and vowels in one post. But, the consonants complained that they deserved their own post and I caved.
And then you, yes, you up there in the cheap seats, went and ruined it for everybody else.
By asking about the vowels.
So now, I must once again tunnel into the rabbit hole that is the Thai language – a hole that I had bulldozed over in a failed attempt at preserving my paper-thin skim of self-respect that remains – to bring to light how much less I actually know than what I think I know. Or even should know.
Sad.
When we left off last time, I had gone through all the different rules regarding the behavior of consonants according to some arbitrary schema designed in the 18th Century to preserve the ability of Thai people to read scriptures written over two millennia previously. A noble goal indeed for a modern populace whose current culture is dominated by movies and series about ghosts.
The vowels, in comparison to the consonants, are absolutely, positively, smiling-as-I-walk-down-the-street-in-the-sunshine more complicated, arbitrary, and shape-shifting than I, when I first embarked on this linguistic expedition, could have imagined.
First, there are no vowels that are represented by a single letter, they’re all just multi-purpose symbols which may be used in different ways. Sometimes the symbols do stand alone. Other times those same symbols, when combined with others, make a completely different sound. They can even make the exact same sound as another of those symbols.
Next, Thai loves diphthongs. These are the vowels that make two distinct sounds. English has a few of these – mostly mere glides into ending letters like “w” or “y” – like “cow” or “boy”. In Thai these are much more pronounced (both literally and as an intended pun). So much so that to a western ear they sound like two syllables – Chiang Mai, meuang, the word for city, or biere, the word for what you’ll need when you’re done reading this.
Thai is also accurate. A vowel always sounds the same. Period. None of the beer, bier, bear, dear bullshit English learners must contend with. This is not to say Thai vowels are easy by any means, just consistent. For example, “a”. Is it the “a” in “ancient” or “cat” or “gate”? Is it the “sometimes-y” in “amplify”, “simply”, or “ytterbium”? YIKES! Thai has only one spelling choice for each vowel sound. And the long and short vowels are exactly that – how long each sound is said. None of the bone, bore, bode, long/short conundra that litter the literary liturgy of English.
Lastly, for now, anyway, Thai is also subject to the First Rule of Languages: There are always exceptions. Being located in southeast Asia, inscrutability is built into the Thai language. And, appropriately, it all revolves around things that are there, not being there, and things that are not there, really being there. Kind of like ghosts.
So, Let’s start there.
Wherever “there” may be.
Thai has this exception, mentioned in the previous post, that when two consonants occur next to each other and they aren’t one of the fifteen allowed consonant clusters then other rules apply. I used the “sr” in “Sriracha” (the original home of the hot sauce which tastes nothing like that Rooster-Brand swill the Americans are so fond of.) as an example. In this case the “r” is dropped and it’s just pronounced “Siracha”. (Which is not the sound you just made in your head, but that’s not important right now.)
There is another rule that tells you what to do when all else fails: The Implied Vowel Rule. At its core, the Implied Vowel Rule says that if two consonants occur together in a syllable then a short “o” sound is implied or if a standalone consonant is the only letter in a syllable, then a short “ah” sound is implied. This rule exists to make sure the mandatory C1V(C2) syllable structure rule we talked about last time is always followed.
But.
When all you have are consonants where are the syllables?
Consider a word like ถนน (tnn, it means road). It has three consonants in a row. Thai syllables are not allowed three consonants. Which means it’s at least two syllables. Therefore, it must be subject to the Implied Vowel Rule. But how? “tanana”? “tonna”? What does the rule say about this?
Nothing. Nada. Bupkis.
Basically, you’re forced to apply the rule backwards. So, you read ถนน and you say okay, it ends in น so that previous น means the syllable is นน which becomes โนนะ (non) so the ถ is standalone, so it becomes ถะ (tha – pronounced as a soft “t” not a “th”). The whole word then becomes ถะโนนะ (thanon – but only as pronounced, the spelling is still tnn) and after you’ve read enough street signs the pronunciation becomes automatic.
But.
Some of the symbols in vowels can be consonants.
Wait. Wut?
Yeah, it’s pretty sad. Letters like “ว” (w) or “ย” (y) can be part of one of those pesky diphthong vowels. Consider the word “สวน” (swn, it means garden or park). So, applying the Implied Vowel Rule as earlier, you’d end up with “สะโวนะ” (sawon).
But.
You’d also realize – after more than a decade of trying to decipher this shit – that a short “ah” sound in front of a “y” sound yields the vowel “u-a” so you should have applied the rule from front to back which would have given you “สัวน” (pronounced suan which is exactly correct, except that you got the tone wrong).
But, like a twenty-year old, over-tuned, Isuzu D-Max pickup, even the Implied Vowel Rule breaks down. Rarely – in that I only see this a few times per week – there is a combination of vowels and consonants that demand that the Implied Vowel Rule be utilized, but can’t.
A side note: This rule is so obscure that I used it to see if my teachers had a clue what they were talking about or were just following the textbook. Only one did. She was able to articulate it, despite it being weird as fuck, and now I understand why. The question was: Why are some words spelled one way but pronounced another.
Consider the word “โขนง” (khanong) which is part of a place name in Bangkok and is also a fancy way to say eyebrow. Its first symbol is the vowel long-o, like in dope, the other three are consonants so you would think that it would be pronounce “konong” but it’s actually “kanong” Because, when a vowel precedes a high-class consonant which precedes a low-class consonant the vowel adheres to the low-class consonant and the Implied Vowel Rule is used for the initial high-class consonant. Hence, khanong.
I’m sorry. There is nothing this obscure in any other language on the planet. There can’t be. This is so far into Let’s Fuck With Their Heads territory that you’d need a plane and a refueling stop to reach the border.
But… Wait, there’s more.
Then there’s this symbol “เ” (like a teeny “b”). It is the vowel that makes the long-a sound, like gate or sate. It’s called, for the trivialists, mai na. Which means “front mark” because it always shows up at the front of the syllable.
Well, then why isn’t it called something less stupid? Maybe “a”?
Because it occurs in ten, oops, twelve other vowels, both long and short, and does nothing more than indicate when something weird is about to happen. Sometimes the weirdness just changes the way the next vowel is pronounced. Sometimes it indicates that the vowel is a diphthong: phonetically two distinct sounds, grammatically one vowel. Take Chiang, as in Chiang Mai. In Thai it’s “เชียง”. Three out of the five symbols used to spell that word make up one vowel (which sounds like ee-aa) and one of the symbols that is part of the vowel… is a consonant.
I could go on.
Please. Don’t.
Okay. Fine. But you did ask about the vowels.
I will leave you with a bit of a learning tool since at least a couple of you are going to want to brush up on your Thai, I’m guessing. Much as English has that A, B, C, D, etc.… melodious mnemonic, Thai has something similar.
Just not for the vowels.
